Crescent City

Rating:

Under normal circumstances, it would simply not be a good idea to gather a group of former New Orleanians at a Philadelphia restaurant purporting to serve Creole food. With few exceptions, over the last eight years since I moved back North, such dinners have ended in disappointment and reflections on how difficult it is to find an authentic taste of Louisiana abroad.

But this dinner was different. With the first anniversary of the Big Storm looming, there was a ripe sense of nostalgia in the air, an extra edge of yearning that had me feeling even more charitable than usual. South Street's five-month-old Crescent City was in line for a little lagniappe slack. It didn't have to taste exactly like Upperline, Jacques-Imo's or Galatoire's. I just hoped it would be in the right state of mind.

The mood was fine, the handsomely renovated former pool hall now outfitted with deep-burgundy walls, cozy banquettes, and dark wood floors, its cafe windows swung open to the South Street hustle. A live jazz trio was crooning in the corner.

And as I nibbled my first smoky link of grilled alligator sausage with spice-glazed, deep-fried shrimp, I thought: "Hmmm - maybe... ."

But then it went downhill faster than a slip-and-slide on a short levee. Enter Uncle Ben's rice. And every bad cliche of botched New Orleans cooking.

The fried oysters, cloaked in an awkwardly puffy, seasoned-flour batter instead of a traditional cornmeal crisp, were falling out of their soggy crusts. The lightly stewed shrimp Creole tomato gravy was treacly sweet, then topped, quite oddly, with deep-fried shrimps. The red beans and rice, meanwhile, the most rudimentary of Louisiana cookery, looked and tasted like a can of watery, precooked kidney beans dumped over starchless minute rice. Which is pretty much exactly what it was.

Chef Michael Duplantis, who co-owns Crescent City with Michael Munoz, conceded that he didn't always have time to cook his red beans from dry, but has compensated by giving them a nice slow bake in the oven. No offense, but they bake beans in New England. In New Orleans, it's the slow flame beneath a pot on the stove and the back of a wooden spoon that give red beans their creamy pink gravy.

OK, so we're not talking Bourbon Street here. Truth be told, Duplantis and Munoz never intended for Crescent City to be perceived as a strictly New Orleans restaurant, but rather, as a friendly bistro with a casual style and some Southern inspirations.

It certainly is a friendly place. Our waitress maintained her cheery disposition even after filing a mid-meal report to the police station nearby regarding a dine-and-dash bandit. Munoz is an affable maitre d', capable of answering every question that our servers couldn't on the menu or the decent little wine list.

And for his part, Duplantis - who co-owned a restaurant with Munoz called Orleans on the North Jersey Shore - claims to be serving up fare at least loosely inspired by Louisiana roots on his father's side.

The jambalaya was probably the closest dish to legit, its brown-tinted rice infused with good sausage, chicken, and oniony tomato gravy. I just couldn't understand why the entree, typically a hearty pile of rice, was reduced to a dainty scoop ringed by fried chicken thighs and country chicken gravy. The side of jambalaya was much more generous.

I'm not averse to playing with familiar dishes - New Orleans chefs have been reinventing their cuisine for decades. But the new ideas have to make sense. When you taste one of Crescent's fried red tomatoes - overly breaded, the interior heated to sweet mush - you realize why most Southerners fry them tart, firm and green.

The menu attempts to skirt such comparisons by calling them "seared" tomatoes, even though they're obviously fried (and then sauteed to order). But it's a maddening sleight of words that skitters across the menu. The "seared" scallops are dunked in the fryer before getting a finishing sear, then an inky dark sauce that aches with pungent Worcestershire. The "grilled" pork tenderloin also is crisped schnitzel-style before getting char marks on the grill.

In a similarly confusing twist of terminology, the "boneless country ribs" are actually a diced pork-butt stew, though intriguingly seasoned with cinnamon and Mexican chiles.

If you ignore the menu descriptions and focus on flavors, some dishes are more than tasty enough, like the spring rolls stuffed with tender, cilantro-laced roast pork (let's not get into the "Bar-b-Que" label, OK?), or the crisped fillet of grouper over smoke-dusted basil pesto and mashed potatoes. The wild striped bass over canned butter beans in tomato-pepper oil was also a nice showcase for a good piece of fresh fish. The crabcake was an intimidatingly tall pillar of deep-fried crust streaked with chipotle sauce. But its interior, more airy casserole than moist cake, was unexpectedly lovely.

The Chilean sea bass came atop some excellent black beans that tapped all the soul the red beans were lacking. Too bad the slab of fish had been cooked nearly to disintegration.

For dessert, soft oatmeal cookies stuffed with cream-cheese icing were an endearing ode to Li'l Debbies. The "toasted" pecan pie was icy, but I've tasted worse attempts in New Orleans itself. The bananas Foster, supposedly "finished with a blaze of cane rum," had been flamed so long ago, it was little more than a cold brown puddle on the plate.

And even the stirrings of nostalgia from the anniversary of Katrina couldn't lend it genuine warmth.